Jack Saturday

Monday, June 26, 2017

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1630-1632

Work as free play cannot be subject to administration; only alienated labor can be organized and administered by rational routine.Herbert MarcuseEros and Civilization

It’s bizarre to me that people think that I am ‘prolific’ and that I must use every spare minute of my time when in fact, as my intimates have always known, I spend most of my time looking out the window (I recommend it).Joyce Carol OatesThe Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art

Man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is a man, and he is only completely a man when he plays.F. Schiller

in 1930, economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that by the end of the century technology would have advanced sufficiently that in countries such as the UK and the US we’d be on 15-hour weeks. “In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshalled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. Huge swaths of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they believe to be unnecessary. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.”David Graebertheguardian

[emphasis JS]

The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. that's why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system.Arthur C. Clarke

Monday, June 12, 2017

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1624-1626

At least rentier capitalism (where capitalism has a parasitic relationship, leeching on creativity) rather than productive capitalism (in factories and the like) will increase demand for an alternative system of organisation. Fascism, which is always possible, won't be pretty and needs fighting against tooth and nail. Socialism, where there's common ownership over the means of production, distribution and exchange, and no profits being siphoned off into corporations and private landowners, seems altogether more sensible as an organisational concept. Given how the internet has impacted on the way we see intellectual copyright, it doesn't seem quite as pie-in-the-sky as it used to be either. A national minimum income (a wage for being alive instead of a wage for keeping capitalism afloat, essentially) would be a great step towards this model. It's definitely one of the fundamentals worth fighting for.Paul Stanway[emphasis JS]

About 46 per cent of the work done in Canada is at risk of being taken by machines, according to a report that seeks to identify the industries and places across the country that are most vulnerable to automation....“Current predictions suggest that these technologies are likely to disproportionately affect lower paying, lower skilled jobs,” the report said....Accommodation and food service jobs have the highest risk of automation, the study found, followed by jobs in manufacturing and transportation and warehousing.

“About 62 per cent of work activities could be automated within these industries,” the researchers wrote — somewhat concerning, given that these sectors are among the country’s largest employers.Canadian Cities And Industries Most At Risk From AutomationBy Daniel TencerHuffPost Canada[emphasis JS]

I know also that much is waiting for me outside that is very delightful, from what St. Francis of Assisi calls 'my brother the wind, and my sister the rain,' lovely things both of them, down to the shop-windows and sunsets of great cities.Oscar WildeDe Profundis

Monday, June 05, 2017

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1621-1623

It’s populism that gave us Brexit in Britain and President Donald Trump in the United States. It could soon give us President Marine Le Pen in France. But the fundamental lie of populism is that it can “bring the jobs back.”...I can watch what automation is doing in my own neighbourhood. There’s a big supermarket a five-minute walk from my house, and I’m in there almost every day to pick up something or other. Over the years I have got to know most of the people at the checkout counters, at least enough to chat a bit. And now the familiar faces are disappearing, one or more every month, to be replaced by automated self-checkout stations.

And don’t be fooled by the fantasy that computers create equal numbers of new jobs when they destroy old ones. When you lose your secure, well-paid job to a machine, you may end up with a minimum-wage MacJob if you are lucky, but you are just as likely to end up with no job at all.Gwynne Dyer: Universal Basic Income — could it work?The Telegram[emphasis JS]

One multi-tasker bot, from Momentum Machines, can make (and flip) a gourmet hamburger in 10 seconds and could soon replace an entire McDonalds crew. A manufacturing device from Universal Robots doesn’t just solder, paint, screw, glue, and grasp—it builds new parts for itself on the fly when they wear out or bust. And just this week, Google won a patent to start building worker robots with personalities.

If we had a reset button it should have been pushed instead of the 2000 election in the US. Many of us thought Obama was a reset button in 2008. While in ways he was, he is primarily a product of the last stage of the hyper-capitalist, Enlightenment experiment in social administration. He was the best you could get in the final years of the old order but the American version of the experiment has been in collapse for over forty years. The technology driven phase shift is planetary and is changing language and perspective for everyone. And, as we have come to understand, paradigm changes change language first, social structure second and, then literally, our common understanding of how the world works.How to make the best of political collapse . . .Mike MeyerTheOtherLeft

About

About Me

Come by to Jack Saturday once a week for some bracing anti-wage-slavery quotations, it'll be nice to have you over to the place. I'll be including some of the wake of my personal journey through freedom from the job in this third emancipatory phase of history, the phase of liberation of wage-slaves through a Guaranteed Livable Income.
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Come to Extraordinary Discourse for my podcast, wider ranging. It would be a joy to spend an hour a week with you.